Stress, Training and The Wedding......

I have been quite busy lately............ up till this Monday anyway. This past Sunday I had got married to my wonderful wife and what a glorious day it was!!
But everything that led up to the wedding wasn't anywhere close to being glorious. Things were going wrong the whole week, from hotel reservations for guests, the weather (our wedding was outside), incorrect orders, a stressed fiance (which equals a stressed me) and to top it all of my wallet with all my documents and credit cards was stolen. Needless to say, weddings are tougher to plan than I thought (and I thought it was hard)....

Well, I found my refuge at the gym where I let all my stresses out and got ready for each new day. One thing I always scheduled was a workout. Considering it was a very stressful time I made sure the workouts were a little less intense and had less volume than usual. And another thing, I didn't stick to any program or anything because I just came and did what I felt like doing since there was already too much scheduling going on. This made the training more fun and made me more relaxed.

After the wedding my wife and I went to the beach for four days (a mini honeymoon). This was greatly appreciated since we had a very tough month and we needed a break, I can definitely say that I needed a break from training as well as I have a tendency to push myself too hard.

Starting tomorrow I am back on the schedule and I am back in the weight room and basketball gym working towards my goals. I am also excited about my trip to Boston at the end of the month to train with Eric Cressey (www.ericcressey.com). If you don't know who he is then you need to find out....

To sum up my post.....when life is stressful you still need to do the thing that will get you ahead, take time off when you need it, don't let changes in life make you lose your focus, hang around smarter people than you and you will take steps towards your goals......

What Should I Do In The Basketball Off Season

I have been playing basketball since I was around 7 but I started training with a team when I was 1o years old. Since then I have been playing basketball all the time whether it was the season, pre-season, off season, vacation time.......you name it, I played ball. The reason is not hard - I loved it (and still do)!

Once I got to college I still played the whole time over the summer. I would also lift weights and do my strength and conditioning and by the time I came for pre-season to train with the college basketball team I was a mile ahead of everybody else when it came to conditioning and strength and my shot felt great, everything was the way I wanted it to be. It felt good to say the least but I wasn't ready for what happened after that.......as the season was starting I started getting tired and my shot wasn't falling like it was supposed to, bottom line, my performance was not anywhere near optimal. It was hard but I had admit it to myself that I was doing too much all the time and the bod needed a rest sometime and it just happened to be the beginning of the basketball season!

It is 2 years after my college playing days and I have two professional basketball seasons behind me and I so much more knowledge about preparing for an upcoming season, especially when it comes to strength, conditioning, skill work.
Even though there has been so much progress in the strength and conditioning field there are still so many players, and even more disturbingly - teams, that are using outdated methods that do not help them in the long run. I will talk about some of the problems I see and things that can be done to improve them.

- Training full speed after the season is over. After the season is over the athlete should take time to recuperate and not think about their sport, take a vacation and most importantly fix any injury or problem they had during the season. When players keep going after the season is over it is a sure way to overtrain.

- Not enough corrective exercise and strength training. Every athlete has imbalances ( in some sports more than other) which they need to address because imbalances nearly always lead to injuries and decrease performance in the long run. Every basketball player should strength train, whether to get stronger faster or put on some functional muscle mass. From my experience most players should just focus on getting stronger, which will bring up their other athletic abilities (and also help fix their imbalances when the right exercises are used).
- Too much conditioning work in the early off-season. Most of the players I know that do train when they have a break, do too much conditioning early in the off-season and just keep going with it all the way in to pre-season. They focus on running and other aerobic work and do very little strength, speed or agility training.
- Playing basketball games, tournaments, summer leagues the whole summer. When trying to get exposure there is nothing wrong with playing a tournament or a summer league but I see many players doing that the whole summer while they should be improving in the gym, on the track or doing more skill work. When you play basketball year round, you do not have time to fix your imbalances, take a mental break, and work on the things that will make you a better player. Just playing by itself is not gonna automatically make you better, many times it will reinforce the things you are doing wrong (pick and choose the most important games and tournaments).
- Doing nothing and waiting for team pre-season. I know a lot of guys that relax a whole lot the whole off-season and expect to get in great shape and improve in the team's pre-season. Let me give you a hint - it's not happening!!! Pre-season is geared towards sport specific conditioning and even more so team offesnse, defense, etc. You are not going to improve in the 4-6 weeks of pre-season (especially if you were doing very little the whole summer) and you will be very very lucky if you will be where you were last year (who doesn't want to improve every year? If that's you, then stop playing!)
- Letting yourself get out of shape. There is nothing wrong with taking time off and letting your mind and body take a brake. This is done for the reason that you can come back mentally strong and ready to go and improve in the off season. What you should not do is just be careless and do things that are not good for your body such as excess drinking, too much unhealthy eating, laying around for long periods of time, smoking, etc. Such things will make sure you get overweight and really out of shape so that when you start training it will take a lot of hard work to just get where you used to be (it is a lot easier to get out of shape then to get in shape!). If you live a healthy lifestyle in general then it will be much easier for you......
- When the time comes doing too much aerobic training. It still seems to be the trend that to get in basketball shape we need to run for miles and miles of steady state cardio. At least it seems like that since I still see the majority of the coaches doing it which carries down to the players doing it in their off season. If you can run 10 miles at a slow pace, it doesn't mean you will be able to run 20 full out basketball court sprints with short breaks! The energy systems used in basketball are 80% ATP-PC, 10% glycolysis, 10% aerobic..............you might be asking what that means? It means you should cut down the long slow running workouts and start doing more interval training, circuits, etc...

Those are just some of things that should and should not be done in the basketball off-season according to me. There are quite a few more but I will leave that for another post since there is already enough to think about in this one.
If you can take at least a couple of points and implement them into your off-season to boost your results, performance, get you in a good team, or anything other for that matter, then great!
If not, then you will soon figure out that you should......

Why I Love Kettlebells

I have always been somebody who wanted to try out all the different kinds of training available, whether it was different programs or different tools. When I was younger there would be ads in magazines about the best new device to get your vertical up or to get your abs super strong and because I was young and didn't know any better, I went and bought them.
Time and effort let me know that these devices didn't work and all I did was get frustrated and look for the new miracle device.

But I soon started studying strength training books, russian manuals, speed training etc.... and started realizing that everything is built on principles of training. I also realized that there is no secret training tool that will do miracles without applying the sound principles.

Since then I have used many tools to improve my strength, mostly staying with barbells, dumbells, bodyweight, until my brother told me to try these things called kettlebells. When I first saw them I didn't know what to think since they looked like a cannonball with a handle but I said I would give them a try since I have nothing to lose. I had a great workout my first time and even though I had mixed feeling I said I would return. The next day I felt every muscle in my body and I could barely sit but to me that was a sign that it was a different type of training. From that day on the kettlebell was a new tool I would definitely use.

I actually barely went to the gym for the next three months and trained with kettlebells exclusively and after returning to the gym my numbers went up. I'm not gonna write how much but let's just say it was quite a bit. I knew that a lot of it had to do with them being a new training stimulus and breaking my previous plateau but in my eyes the kettlebell was staying for good. And the funny thing is the kettlebells are so much fun to train with you don't want to stop! Rarely has there ever been a tool that could challenge you so much and let you have as much fun at the same time (CAUTION: handle with care, can be addictive).

Its been four years since I started training with kettlebells and they are not my ''end all be all'' of training but I use them quite a lot, some periods more, some periods less. They made such an impact on me that I went to the Denmark and got my RKC certification, which was a great experience in itself and I also got to meet and talk to the legendary Pavel Tsatsouline (this guy knows strength training, and guess what-he's Russian).

My brother, my friend and I also opened up a gym (as far from mainstream as it gets) which specializes in kettlebell training and it has been going incredibly well, not too mention there is so much room to grow.

I haven't forgotten that principles of training are the foundation on which we build on and a majority of my training still gets done in the gym, but kettlebells will always be a mainstay in my training because as much as they are a tough, they relax me because I'm having fun training with them.

Don't get sucked into fads but do open your mind to other training tools because you might see how useful they are or maybe they were meant for somebody like you (who is missing a breath of fresh air).

Until the next time, keep swinging.......

10 Things We Need To Do More Off

I feel that there are more and more good personal trainers, strength coaches, speed coaches, etc than there have ever been but there are still too many myths in the fitness industry and I still see the majority of the people in gyms doing two chest only days a week, focusing mainly on their ''guns'', the squat rack being taken over by the biceps society, doing 45 mins of cardio on the treadmill, and I could go on........

I know that many lists have been done on this subject but obviously not enough! So everybody should write them until I see more changes....

Now, what should we do more of (all of them are important so whatever applies to you the most)?

1. More compound ''most bang for the buck'' movements (deadlift, squat, bench, military press, chins, pull ups, cleans)

2. Focus more on posterior chain strength (glutes, hamstrings, low back)

3. More pulling movements (deadlifts, rows, pull ups)

4. More single leg work (pistols, step ups, lunge variations, single leg RDL's,...)

5. Use more interval training for fat loss and conditioning as it is superior

6. Use more soft tissue work such as foam rolling, ART, rolfing, deep tissue massage

7. Focus more on our ankle, hip, thoracic spine and scapular mobility and our knee, lumbar spine and scapular stability

8. Even if we do corrective exercise we need to focus on our posture the other 23 hours we are out of the gym (you cannot correct everything in an hour if you are messing up the other 23 hours)

9. Use more odd object lifting in your workouts (kettlebells, sandbags, logs, kegs)

10. Taking it easy or taking time off when you need it (deloading)

11. Have more attitude and the focus to reach your goals.

12. Oh, and lift some heavier weights for crying out loud!

I was never good at sticking with the rules........

Doing too much vs. not doing enough

In training for performance (or looks for that matter) there is a line between not doing enough (not enough stimulus) to get the expected results and doing too much (overtraining), which doesn't get you where you want to go either. To top it all off there are a lot of factors that influence whether we are doing too much, from our actual time spent in the gym, to our nutrition, how much we sleep, to how much stress we are under at our job and in our home.

It is quite hard to reach a state of overtraining when we are considering your time in the gym, especially if you are not a professional athlete, but coupled with many of the other stressors mentioned above, it is not very difficult to push yourself into a state of overtraining (and I'm quite sure that most of us experience at least some stress from our life outside the gym). We should consider this whenever we program for ourselves or our clients.

Now the other category......

Not doing enough! Usually this comes down to laziness and/or not organizing ourselves. Really there isn't much scientific stuff that I can tell you but get off your butt's and do something. I understand that there are good and bad programs but at the end of the day if you are doing any type of program with consistency and intensity, it will yield results! Now that doesn't mean you shouldn't take into consideration the program you are on and make sure it is tailored to your goals, but even if you have the best program for you it will not mean anything if you do not do it with consistency and intensity.

It is very rare that I hear people complain about overtraining but everyday I hear people complaining about how they need to get in shape and get stronger and how they don't have the time to do it, or the program just isn't working, or any one of hundreds of other excuses.

Maybe we should try to lean towards ''overtraining'' and then the results will come.....

I know I need to calm myself down and take a couple of days off because I have over done it. Can't wait to get back in the gym and reach for my new goals. Anyone care to join me?